The story
A product positioned for European launch around who actually decides, country by country.
In neurological disorders, treatment decisions rarely rest with one specialist, and rarely look the same across countries. We mapped the full multidisciplinary decision unit in five European markets: who initiates treatment, who continues it, who is in the room when it starts or stops. That picture showed where the product genuinely fits in the existing treatment landscape.
The company knew its specialists. What it could not see was everything around them: how care for this neurological disorder actually runs day to day, who else shapes it, and how much of that changes from one European market to the next. The treatment strategy had been built around the most visible names in the field. A reasonable starting point had quietly become the whole picture.
In this disease, prescribing responsibility rarely sits where org charts suggest. The clinician who initiates treatment is not always the one who manages it, and start/stop decisions are typically shaped by a small group working together rather than a single decision-maker. Care is organised differently in every market, and rarely documented in a way that allows comparison. A positioning built on clinical differentiation alone risked missing where the product would actually sit in the practical treatment sequence.
Five markets, one comparable picture
We mapped the full multidisciplinary care team in each of five European markets, looking well beyond the visible specialists. We traced prescribing dynamics: who initiates, who continues, and how that responsibility shifts across the care team. And we identified who is actually in the room when a treatment is started or stopped, and how that decision is reached in practice.
Bringing the five country pictures together showed where care and prescribing dynamics align across Europe and where they meaningfully diverge. It also gave the team a grounded view of where the product fits within the existing treatment landscape.
From assumed model to mapped reality
The launch strategy now rests on how care and prescribing actually work, market by market, rather than a single assumed model. The team knows who to engage beyond the obvious specialists, holds a comparable view of start/stop dynamics across all five markets, and positions the product on where it genuinely fits in practice.
"We thought we knew the prescriber. What changed everything was seeing who else had to be in the room before a treatment decision could move."